Tag: Development

Here’s a sweet story of gene expression and fruit form, starting with the simple question of “why do closely related strawberry and raspberry fruits look so different?” In strawberry, the ovaries become dry achenes where in raspberies they become juicy druplets; in strawberry the stem tip (receptacle)…

This study by Turner et al. looks at the patterns of leaf and sporangia arrangement in early leafy plant species, questioning the widely held idea that these structures follow the Fibonacci sequence. The researchers investigated fossilized remains from the Early Devonian period. To evaluate the spatial…

It’s pretty obvious that plants are not simply balls of cells. Their shapes and patterns are determined in large part through processes that cause cells to grow and divide asymmetrically, through the establishment of cell polarity. When I set out to read this review I was a bit nervous, expecting to…

Mature grass leaves contain two specialized types of epidermal cells: stomata and epidermal hairs (trichomes). Stomatal pores are crucial for CO2 uptake and water conservation, while epidermal hairs contribute to water regulation and provide protection against UV-B light. If stomatal identity is not…

This is one of those “straight into the textbook” stories. Kellenberger et al. investigated the unusual petal pigmentation pattern of a South African daisy Gorteria diffusa, which has petals with odd lumpy irregular spots that mimic female flies and enhance pollination through sexual deception. The…

Flowers come in a breathtaking variety of shapes and sizes. The structures making up a flower, called sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels, all derive from the tightly regulated differentiation of a pool of stem cells in the so-called floral meristem. Floral meristem termination (FMT) is a crucial stage…

The Arabidopsis thaliana leaf exhibits dramatic phenotypic changes across the juvenile-to-adult phase transition during vegetative development. For example, juvenile leaves are small, round, and lack trichomes (leaf hairs). By contrast, adult leaves contain trichomes on the abaxial (or lower) leaf surface,…

Generally, light inhibits hypocotyl elongation. Like red and blue light, green light was previously reported to inhibit hypocotyl elongation in several plants. Here, Hao et al. discovered that the inhibition of hypocotyl growth by green light is due to wavelength impurities in the green lights used.…